Co-pending patent application Ser. No. 09/451,480 discloses an improved communication system and method that includes a number of unique features. One of the features disclosed and described in Ser. No. 09/451,480 is a universal communication address that can be dynamically updated to be mapped to one or more other communication addresses. A universal address is a comprehensive identifier that can be mapped to, and used to communicate with, any number of individual communication addresses such as telephone numbers, facsimile numbers, electronic mail addresses, etc. All incoming and outgoing communication can now be routed through the universal address. As a result, it is no longer necessary for people to remember multiple telephone numbers, facsimile numbers and/or e-mail addresses. Any of these individual communication addresses can be automatically reached using the universal address, assuming that the appropriate mapping is up to date with the most current information. This is particularly useful when individual communication addresses change—for example, when a new mobile telephone account in activated. When this happens, all that is required is that the appropriate mapping associated with the universal address be updated to include the telephone number of the new mobile account. No changes are made to the universal address itself, or to the manner or process in which others attempt to reach the addressee, except that now when they use the universal address, they will be automatically connected to the new mobile telephone number.
There are a number of potential applications that might be able to exploit these and other aspects of universal addressing. One such application is in the area of roaming in wireless telephone systems. Roaming refers to when a subscriber is in a geographical area not served by a subscriber's home network. A mobile station, such as a cellular telephone, has the ability to roam to other cellular systems such as a cellular system other than its home system (i.e., the cellular system in which the subscriber has an account), and place and/or receive calls. A drawback or roaming is that a roaming mobile station will incur additional charges, and possibly long distance charges, when placing or receiving calls. These roaming charges may vary depending upon the particular cellular system in which the subscriber is roaming, but they can be significant, particularly when traveling internationally. For example, a subscriber having a cellular account in the United States who travels abroad to the United Kingdom and attempts to use his United States mobile telephone to call either a local number in the United Kingdom or an international number in the United States may have to pay up to $1.34 per minute in international roaming charges from his United States cellular account. Most individuals who travel internationally on a regular basis are either forced to accept these significant roaming charges or sign-up for different accounts, each with its own telephone number, in each of the countries in which they travel.
Accordingly, a need exists for an improved communication system and method designed to address this issue of international roaming costs. More specifically, a need exists for an improved communication system and method that leverages existing communication networks to allow for real-time communication through a dynamically updateable universal address to reduce or eliminate international roaming costs by converting an international call into a series of local calls over the communication network.